Andy Van Gundy has given me permission to post a link to his new paper on "The Care and Feeding of Strategic Innovation Challenges." Andy's a judge in the current Thunderbird Innovation Challenge (I am a judge as well, but Andy's the "Chief Judge" for the final round!) and has served as "Chief Framing Architect for the official Innovation Challenge questions."

It's critical to frame innovation challenges correctly because if you don't, you won't be able to generate actionable ideas. Instead, you'll get the "blue sky" stuff that gives creativity a bad name, because it's so far out it's either not feasible or just plain not usable.

Andy's paper is well worth reading in its entirety. Here's the nutshell version:

In framing an innovation challenge you should:

-- Construct "tactical maps" that lay out the strategic terrain
-- Identify the primary objective
-- Detail and appropriately link together secondary objectives

Also, try not to muddy the challenge with excess positioning elements or constraints, or elements that should be reserved for use as evaluation criteria for possible solutions.

Framing is a part of the innovation process that often gets overlooked because it's not nearly as sexy as idea generation or prototyping solutions. But it's absolutely critical because it's almost impossible to be focused enough to come up with actionable solutions without framing.

When we begin a new client project, we hold what we call an "alignment meeting" either in person or by phone. Before the meeting we'll distribute to the stakeholders a list of questions we've written that aims to get at the information we need to frame the issue and understand exactly where we need to focus the ideation and give us the information we need to evaluate the ideas and guide us toward the most actionable solutions. Andy's paper will give us valuable insight into better ways to do this entire part of the process.